Iran covering up ‘suicide’ death of Iranian-Canadian activist in prison: rights groups

Kavous Seyed-Emami was a popular sociology professor. Two weeks after being locked up for alleged espionage in Iran, his family was told Emami killed himself in his cell. They don't believe it. But as Mike Armstrong reports, the truth may never be known.

There are telltale signs that the Iranian government isn’t being exactly forthcoming about the death of Iranian-Canadian environmental activist and professor Kavous Seyed-Emami in a Tehran prison, human rights groups say.

Seyed-Emami’s son, Raam, announced on Saturday that his father, a Tehran-based sociology professor who was also the managing director of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, had died in prison.

He was imprisoned in late January, with Iranian authorities claiming that he was gathering classified information under the guise of carrying out environmental and scientific work.

The news of my father's passing is impossible to fathom. Kavous Seyed Emami was arrested on Wednesday 24 January 2018, and the news of his death was released to my mom, Maryam, on Friday the 9th of February. I still can’t believe this.

The group said Seyed-Emami’s wife was summoned to Tehran’s Evin Prison on Friday, Feb. 9 and interrogated for four hours, before being told that her husband had committed suicide.

“Iranian judicial authorities think they can get away with claiming that Seyed-Emami, a well-known professor, simply committed suicide while being detained in one of the highest-security wards of Evin prison,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The Iranian judiciary long ago lost its credibility after failing to investigate repeated incidents of torture and mistreatment in detention.”

Those suspicions were echoed by the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI).

“Claims that Seyed-Emami’s death was a suicide have no credibility whatsoever. This is a prison system out of control and a judiciary that is actively colluding in a massive coverup,” said the group’s executive director, Hadi Ghaemi. “The authorities’ remarks about the case from start to finish and the pressure they are putting on the family leaves no doubt that there is a concerted state coverup.”

Authorities have reportedly been pressuring Seyed-Emami’s family to bury him in a private funeral, and have been resisting the family’s calls for an independent autopsy to be conducted.

“You cannot be both the accused and the investigator and expect people to believe your conclusion,” a relative of Seyed-Emami’s told CHRI.

It has also claimed that the family has been placed under police surveillance and that authorities are using intimidation tactics to discourage them from speaking publicly about the case.

Seyed-Emami’s son tweeted that his father’s funeral was scheduled for Tuesday, but he didn’t respond to Global News’ request for comment.

Trevor Harrison, a sociology professor at the University of Lethbridge who knew Seyed-Emami, said he emailed him in January to ask if he was OK in the wake of unrest in Iran.

“He wrote back and said, ‘yes I’m fine,'” Harrison told Global News. “He said there’s always … excitement going on here, but he didn’t indicate any particular concern or threat to himself.”

CHRI is asking Canada to push for a UN investigation into Seyed-Emami’s death.

The Canadian government says it’s monitoring the situation and consular officials are working with the family — but from Turkey, because Canada doesn’t have an embassy in Iran, having cut off diplomatic relations with the Islamic Republic in 2015.